Techniques

Highs and Lows of Calibrating and Profiling Mac screens

Getting the story right with colour calibration and profiling on iMac and MacBook Pro screens is not a simple task. As I’ve discovered the work-flow is let down by the inability of the user to adjust the iMac or Mac Book monitors RGB balance. Mac only offers options to adjust Native Gamma, Target Gamma and Target White Point.

Screen Shot 2013-09-14 at 12.35.58 PM

All this first came to a head after purchasing DataColour’s Spyder 4 Pro and noticing that after calibration/profiling, despite the significant improvement, my iMac monitor still had a distinct green cast when looking at both colour and or black and white images and that my MacBook had a distinct blue cast. I started asking some questions.

IMG_6728

Visibly evident green and blue cast after Spyder 4 Pro/ Dataclour calibration.

A friend of mine recently put me onto DispcalGUI, which is open source.  DispcalGUI provides customizable settings for “whitepoint, luminance, black level, tone response curve as well as options to create matrix and look-up-table ICC profiles, with optional gamut mapping” as well as providing a very extensive array of colour patches.

Running the first calibrations using DispcalGUI on the iMac and MacBook made it obvious that I was out on a ledge in terms of getting the best response curves because the initial white point and RGB measurements revealed things like this…

Screen Shot 2013-09-14 at 12.43.30 PM

You can see on the iMac that blue and red are under whilst green is significantly over in the balance. Unfortunately on Mac systems there appears to be no way to adjust the RGB gain controls manually or via 3rd party software. Even Argyll CMS, which runs fine under Windows was not able to talk to Mac.

After running a second calibration and profile using DispcalGUI on the MacBook you can see a more neutral response to to the black and white image below. However it’s not perfect and still tends to be a little on the blue side which was shown as still being off target in the ‘Interactive Dispay Adjustment” panel prior to the Calibration. I was able to get above 100% of sRGB but only 75-78% of RGB.

IMG_6733

Running Colour Eyes Display Pro (fully functional trial) did little to alleviate the cast and the software began to glitch quite badly after the first two runs. I understood that it should be able to talk to and adjust the RGB settings for Mac monitors. But there was little to see that supported that and measuring RGB using DispcalGUI afterwards indicated little change.

Colour Munki looks like the next stop.

Terra Australis

This has to be one of the most gorgeous time-lapse productions based around the theme of the Australian urban and natural landscapes.

1080p full screen is the best way to watch this, either here, or over at Vimeo.

You can read the full production notes here

Using Photoshop Lens Blur with depth map

This looks pretty interesting….

– “Using the Lens Blur Filter on an image Sequence in Photoshop CS6
Even with the fantastic new Blur Gallery in Photoshop CS6, the Lens Blur filter is an essential tool when a high degree of control is needed to selectively (and realistically) blur an image. In this video tutorial, Julieanne uses the Lens Blur filter with a depth map to to create a series of images that appear as if they were captured with a tilt-shift lens. Julieanne also demonstrates how to quickly apply this filter to multiple images using actions and batch processing”.

Watch the tutorial here

Photoshop Touch for IOS

image courtesy of Petapixel

It was a long wait but worth it. Whilst Android users have had access to this for some time, Photoshop Touch has remained painfully out of reach for IOS users, the logic of which defied me completely, given the sheer volume  of the market share for iPads as opposed to Android tablets. However it’s here and comes with an impressive arsenal. The only weak area for me is the 1600px output, but who am I to complain. The rest is more than you could want from a first release. I’ve spent some time this morning putting it through it’s paces and it was certainly better than I had expected, no glitches and some very pleasant surprises.  Good job Adobe.

You can get the blurb material here, here and here

And my run through here

Dustin Farrell | Timelapse

I simply had to re post this after viewing it on Planet 5D.

Some stunning time lapse photography here and best of all a very concise overview of the process by the man himself. Read it here